Feb's latest journal, "Isolation Amidst Connection," is such a wonderful representation of much of my own thinking that I needed to share it here and thus make it a part of this project. I fully endorse Feb's insights and reflections in this journal. I just wish to make a few comments...
First, the person who told Feb that the life of an intellectual is a lonely one was myself. Objectively, there are very few people in the world who are capable of engaging with high-level intellectual issues and sustaining high-level effort in thinking through the issue and advancing our collective knowledge in regard to it. However, I want to be clear that this doesn't mean that the intellectual can operate strictly on his or her own. Advances in knowledge, improvements in theory, come from exposing one's findings and ideas to the outside world and receiving the criticisms and compliments of other intellectuals. Progress cannot come from just one person. The life of the intellectual is empirically lonely; it cannot be totally isolated. One of the greatest elements of the EMC2 program is that it brings together a number of intellectuals with the potential to help each other grow, even though each may be studying their own topic.
Second, I think the gradual development of connections between one's subject of study with other subjects is the hallmark of any mastery of a subject. Thinking that different topics exist independently of each other, even though they exist in the same world as each other, is a sure sign that the individual does not understand the topics he or she is considering. People make fun of me all the time for always relating every issue or topic back to economics, but I don't consider this to be a bad thing. It means that I see economics in all of these other topics. I've reached such a level of understanding with economics that I can see how it connects to and informs everything else. I merely find it frustrating that others can't see what I see, and reject information that I know could help them because they think it is coming from a category of knowledge irrelevant to their own. Additionally, as I explained to Noah the other day, the process of analysis (good thinking) is to break down one's subject into its parts, and to consider each part in turn. The purpose of analysis is to get at the core of the issue, something fundamental that more people will understand and agree on, thus providing support for your more complicated conclusion. Analysis, breaking down subjects, therefore, is meant to reveal the commonalities between their parts. So, the fact that many of the topics being studied in EMC2 are beginning to come together on fundamental issues is unsurprising, though gratifying, and I am proud that Feb can see this.
Finally, I want to relate this all back to my project, developing a theory of being human. Alex has been writing a lot about how people are all substantively the same, that we should break down borders between us and begin recognizing ourselves in each other. This is true to a significant degree. We are all human beings, meaning that we are all creatures of reason struggling to survive and thrive in the same world as each other, a world of scarcity. This is the human condition, the one all the English teachers have been talking about throughout our school careers. The human condition is striving to be better off in a world of scarcity. We are all the same in this regard. So, even as we all embark on different paths of study, it's important to realize that we are all doing substantially the same thing, as Feb recognizes in her journal. Every search for knowledge is a personal one, but we all have the same fundamental reasons for our search because we're all fundamentally the same. Knowledge is for a purpose, and that purpose is the same for every human action, to make us better off despite living in a world of scarcity. At their core, all big questions of human knowledge come down to more fundamental questions: What are we? What should we do? How can we do it? The routes we take to answer these questions may appear very different, but, beneath the surface, we're all working toward the same essential goal in essentially the same way.
Well done, Feb. This journal was impressively insightful and beautifully expressed. Thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment